What autism means to me

Lately, it is as if every person and their dog is writing about what autism means to them. So I thought that I would throw in a little bit. However, I am not going to write exactly about what it means to me so much as use metaphors of exclusion.

The yawning abyss between myself and other people who say they are autistic

“We rock, we flap” etc etc, Amy Sequenzia writes.

This, in itself, speaks to one of the gravest problems that I presently have, not just with the autistic movement, but in general. I am being treated as if I do not exist. I do not rock. I do not flap. I yell nasty things. I throw punches. I swing my feet into people. I snarl, spit, bite, and a million other nasty things. If I had an axe, I would swing it. If I had a machine gun or similar device allowing me to kill large numbers of people very quickly, I would use it. This can be traced to the behaviours of all of the people (with one exception) that I will be mentioning in this document.

A movement that does not include everyone who is involuntarily a part of it is doomed from the outset. I know at least one other man who is autistic and a veteran. If I were to ask him how much rocking and flapping he does, I would be willing to bet the answer would be very little, or even nil. You see, there are some situations in which the simple act of twitching can prove to be your worst enemy.

When one’s blood glucose level is below 3.0 mmol/l, the amount of involuntary movement one does is really amazing to behold. At a level of 1.0 mmol/l or less, the term “involuntary breakdance” (copyright me, so fukk off) is applicable. As is the phenomenon of fukking idiots dancing around you telling you to stop moving no matter how loudly you scream at them that their movements are feeding yours.

This is just one of many ways in which I feel a yawning, ever-growing abyss between myself and other people who say they are autistic. You cannot handle the fact that some of us value having tight regulation of our bodily movements. So you pretend we do not exist, and speak as if we are not there.

I do not rock.
People who “flap” in front of my face (that is, wave their hands in a “go this way” fashion as one fukking idiot recently did whilst I was on a bus and suffering anxiety attacks) make me want to kick their arse until their ears bleed.If you cannot promote autistic people as a public image without using a stereotype that excludes me, you seriously need to fukking rethink your strategies.

The abyss between myself (and, I suspect, other Powell types) and the “accepted” autistic stereotype is widening every day. That needs to stop.

I have no family as far as I am concerned

To me, my mother is little more than a puppet with my asshole coward male parent’s arm protruding from the bottom.

Crushing a person’s dreams and trying to force them to adopt yours in their place is abuse.

And that is all I have to say about family.

People and staff at Westmead Hospital

Recently, I had occasion to visit Westmead Hospital seeking help obtaining Seroquel (an atypical antipsychotic that in small doses (50mg) allows me to regulate my sleep pattern). I complained of several problems, including emotional disturbance.

One woman I spoke with at this hospital ended a sentence with, and I quote, “when you were having paranoid delusions”. If this is how someone in charge at Westmead Hospital interprets my complaints about how psychologically unsettling it is to hear “oh, this guy shot a bunch of children in a special needs school, ergo he is autistic”, then we have a very serious problem, Westmead Hospital.

First of all, I have a number of articles stored on my phone now that demonstrate both systematic ill treatment of the autistic and systematic tolerance of ill treatment of the autistic. If the mother of a child with epilepsy was in receipt of a letter telling her to euthanise her child because the child’s epilepsy was too damned inconvenient for the neighbours, the author would be tracked down and charged with crimes. Hate crimes. But apparently this is perfectly okay when the child is autistic. And please, do not get me started on the article about a university in Western Australia doing research into selective abortion of male foetuses on the rationale that males are more frequently diagnosed as autistic. You might think that is legitimate research. The UN has a very different definition of investigations designed to prevent further generations of a population from being born. They call it genocide.

I love Parramatta, its people, its cultures, and its structure. But if I could pick one place on Earth to wipe out and start all over again, that place would be you, Westmead Hospital and everyone working there. And I have not even so much as marked the surface concerning my reasons why.

Queenslanders

The trouble with Queensland is it is full of Queenslanders, one wit put it. He is mostly correct.

I will be brief in this point. When you kidnap a man and force him to live in places of your choosing for years on end, he will begin to hate you. He will begin to hate everything you love, or appear to love.

So, Queenslanders, if you take issue with me hating you, the fact that my worst sensory issues have all occurred on your land, and the fact that your pissy state is basically a life-thief to autistic adults, take it up with Thomas and Carol McIntosh. They are the largest reasons I hate you.

Suzanne Wright

I might write this as a separate article at some point, but I want to touch upon this subject here.

In the trailer for the forthcoming Captain America film, the titular superhero states that he thought punishment came after crimes. As my experiences with my family units, Queenslanders, and real estate agents demonstrate, punishment is often seldom coming at all.

But when a person makes public statements that they intend to murder an entire population, that person is usually escorted away for psychiatric evaluation. Unless they happen to be rich assholes with names like Wright.

Wright has said that she wants to see a day when autism is only a word in a history book.

Let me pause for a moment. Suzanne Wright is pretty much a cancellation of Godwin’s law. Godwin’s law states that in an online debate, the first side to compare the other to the Nazis or Adolf Hitler automatically loses. Well, fukk you and your mother, Godwin, because comparing Suzanne Wright to Adolf Hitler is no longer only appropriate. It is apt.

Several times during the 1930s, Adolf Hitler made speeches in which he made very clear that he wanted to kill every Jew in Europe. One such quote essentially goes something like “if they [the Jews] drag us into another war, then the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. This sounds an awful lot like saying you want to see a day when a group of people are only read about in history books to me.

I have written elsewhere about the remarkable similarities between print ads by the Nazis and Autism Speaks. “This is your money, fellow German” is a good search criteria to use to find such writings.

You see, Suzanne Wright does have differences from Adolf Hitler beyond the obvious physical ones. An insignificant one is that she inherited her fortune, as opposed to making her way in a hard and uncaring world like Adolf. The significant difference, however, is in her ability to carry out her plans. Even if her extermination party were to use a one shot, one kill policy, they would require no less than forty-eight million bullets to make autism a thing only read about in history books. That number is based on the credible estimates, not the upward-revised scaremonger estimates, by the way.

I am unsure of how many bullets changed hands between the Wermacht and their enemies between 1939 and 1945, but forty-eight million would probably only be a small fraction.

Murdering all of the autistic people on the planet would require organisation and mechanisation that no private individual nor conservative government could ever achieve. So there is that to take as a comfort. But it still comes back to the fukk you, Godwin point. The comparison, based on Wright’s ambition, is apt.

If I were to go into public places and tell the world I have a plan to kill forty-eight million people because I dislike an indelible characteristic that they all share, I would probably end up in permanent detention. So please do not tell me that the law treats me and Suzanne Wright equally. It will not do.

In closing

Autism means several things to me.

It means I will never be able to enjoy a healthy relationship with any members of my “family”.

It means I will never be able to go to some places near where I grew up without feeling unsafe.

It means that no matter how you try to tell me different, there is an organisation and a singular person out there bent on murdering me for being autistic.

It means that others who are deemed to be of my kind pretend I do not exist and refuse to consult me on how they can create a more inclusive strategy.